Casa de fantasmas

large empty halls leading to large empty rooms full of many empty beds

Last Friday, I took a walk around San Juan de Dios with Sole, who is an extraordinary woman, and she echoed the sentiment of horror vacui. “Ahorita, San Juan es como una casa de fantasmas,” she said, sighing.

Soledad is an extraordinary woman, and her name suits her. Before I met her, everyone told me–Soledad will become your mother, just like she is the mother of her children, and of everybody. When I first met her, however, I did not get this feeling. There was something heavy about her, something guarded–don’t get me wrong, she was perfectly kind and wonderful, but not exactly what I expected from the description “motherly.” She was not exuberant, affection and warmth did not spill from her every pore, infectious and overwhelming, as with many women in this country. Her face did not melt into reassuring, honey-like smiles, rather, it seemed to be instilled with quiet suffering and resilience. Compared to Marta, to other volunteers, to my host mom, she seemed stern.

I have now known her for 3 weeks, and every day I am understanding more and more why and how she is the mother of everybody. Watching her with the children in San Juan, and especially watching her through Marden’s leg amputation, was and is truly a wonder. The amount of care she holds in her soul for those around her is miraculous. Sole does not mother superficially. She does not nag, she does not lather you with kisses, she does not spoil. Sole mothers by taking that little space inside your head, or your chest or tummy, or whatever, where you keep your worries, your cares, your burdens, and adding it to her own–all without making you feel guilty about being a source of worry. She mothers silently, steadily, from a distance but very close.

I have been meaning to write about her for a while now, but haven’t felt able to do her justice. I still do not think I have completely communicated what an admirable human being this woman is, but for now this must suffice.

In lighter (?) fare, I found out over lunch that the two children in Medicina D who have swine flu are Jhon and Lady, two of the children that I worked most closely with. I don’t care what doctor host dad says, I think I have swine flu.

Quarantined

The sala in which I usually work at Hospital de Niños is now quarantined for swine flu. I had a dream about that sala last night, and in that dream all of the kids had changed, I didn’t recognize any of them, and Lady was not there.

Of course, right now I’m kind of in a weird sort of quarantine state myself–Sunday night I began to cough like a 70 year old smoker, and by Monday I had contracted some kind of gripe as well. I tried to go to work, really, I did–I got up wee early in the morning and put on my green mandíl and everything, really to hop into a combi and go. But the combination of my overprotective host mother and my doctor host father convinced me to stay at home that day, and I’ve been living in my bed since.

I have this theory which is probably incorrect that staying home when you are ill only makes the illness worse because it forces you to incubate and wallow in your illness, whereas getting up and doing stuff makes you forget and by extension heal. (Yes, I know, I’m going to be an awesome doctor.) Anyways, the point is I’ve been feeling a little crappy these past few days, and I’m not sure if its the sickness or the incubation of the sickness, but luckily my host dad is a doctor and a genius, and luckily I have given in to the culture of pills and Western medication because it is just so easy and am taking antibiotics. Yesterday I woke up at about 12:15 (afternoon) after a restless, feverish, coughing night dreaming alternately that my pillow was a mountain and that I was transferring for a semester from Harvard to Dartmouth, except that Dartmouth was actually Brown. I think I was still semi-delirious, because the first thing I did after waking up was look up the symptoms of swine flu, and take a nhs symptom checker thing online, and proceed to freak out, sure that I had contracted swine flu from the quarantined sala, and had spread it to everyone I knew, or even worse–that I had somehow carried the germ with me from the USA and held it dormant in my body until recently–that Medicina D was quarantined because of me, that I had single-handedly started the gripe porcina scare in Perú.

Then I remembered my dream, and remembered that it was actually a dream–because you know those times when you vaguely remember a dream but don’t really recognize it as imaginary and think of it as a foggy memory–and I realized that I must still be slightly delirious, and I took a shower and my head cleared and I was a little embarrassed about the emails I sent to my friends exclaiming I MAY HAVE SWINE FLU TAKE VITAMIN C NOW.

Anyhow, I can feel myself recovering now, even as the bag of used tissues next to my bed gets heavier and heavier, and hopefully tomorrow I will go back to work.